Posted on this Website in Aug 2003. First Published in LGBT Quakers.
By Mitch Gould

After the albatrosses abandoned Shikoku Island, the five castaways began to starve. Nakahama Manjiro (1827-1898) was feeling lightheaded when the small whaleboat brought him alongside the John Howland. He was a 14-year-old villager from a world closed to all westerners, and he must have considered himself delirious when a coal-black hand reached down and pulled him aboard the 337-ton whaler. But the "noble mein" of Captain William Whitfield, the source of so many barked commands, proved even more overwhelming.

[H]is entire skin was white, his coal-black hair was cut at the nape of his neck, and, when it came to his mustache, [his beard] was completely shaven [away].

Pressing his forehead to the deck, Manjiro kow-towed before the captain as he would before Japan’s Emperor.[1]

During the next two years at sea, Whitfield proved to be "thoughtful, compassionate, and generous." Knowing that the boy faced a death sentence in Japan for fraternizing with Westerners, the widower brought Manjiro into his empty Fairfield, Massachusetts, home. [2] Thus, one morning in 1843 the almond-eyed adolescent woke up to the stench of boiling blubber wafting across the Acushnet River from the New Bedford tryworks. When New Bedford Methodists insisted that Majiro be segregated in a section reserved for nonwhite attenders, Whitfield joined the Unitarian Church of Fairhaven. There the refugee was accepted as a legitimate member of the Whitfield family.[3] This church was, in fact, already home to another kind of refugee—liberal "New Light" Quakers expelled during the 1820s for their resistance to church hierarchy.[4]

After many hardships and dangers, it would be an understatement to say that Manjiro was successfully reintegrated into Japanese society. His keen mind, his thorough education in marine technology, and his firsthand knowledge of American character were indispensable during the opening of Japan to the West. In 1870, a Japanese diplomatic mission allowed him to visit Whitfield to acknowledge his gratitude for the old man’s "fatherly treatment"—for which he thanked God "ten thousand times."[5]

History is replete with legends about resourceful Americans who champion Asian youth. These stories chart the rise of a prodigal (literal or spiritual) who returns to the feudal East as a key democritizer after mentoring by an American mariner, poet, or religious radical.

Japanese theologian Kanzo Uchimura (1861-1930) and diplomat Inazao Nitobe (1862-1933) represent a second generation of young men inspired by muscular Christians.[6] Their autobiographies praise William Clark, the founder of the Sapporo Agricultural College,[7] and the Quaker alienist Isaac Kerlin, who directed the "Pennsylvania Training School for Idiotic and Feeble-minded Children." American friendships enabled these authors to design spiritual frameworks for the democratic transformation of Japan. Uchimura’s dual attraction to Yankee Quakerism and the bushido tradition of samurai philosophy culminated in a syncretist faith known as Mukyokai. It attracted thousands of believers between the world wars. Decades later, Shungo Hirabayashi’s participation in a Mukyokai commune at Auburn, Washington laid the cultural underpinnings for his son Gordon’s landmark resistance to Japanese-American Internment.[8]

As a particularly pertinent aside, Uchimura's Walt Whitman the Poet (1909) and The Poet of the Common People (1914)[9] are interesting because they suggest the theme of international brotherhood in the context of Whitman’s poetry. Recall Whitman's 1860 poem, "Calamus 23."

This moment as I sit alone, yearning and thoughtful, it seems to me
there are other men in other lands, yearning and thoughtful;
It seems to me I can look over and behold them, in Germany, Italy, France, Spain—Or far, far away, in China, or Russia
or India—talking other dialects;
And it seems to me they are as wise, beautiful, benevolent, as any in my own lands;
O I know we should be brethren and lovers,
I know I should be happy with them.[10]

Whitman’s own childhood was spent among the Quaker whalers of Cold Spring Harbor. In "Passage to India"(1867) Whitman (1819-1892) portrayed the Quaker sea-captain as confident enough to build such a spiritual bond in defiance of all censure.[11]

...on waves of extasy to sail,
mid the wafting winds (thou pressing me to thee, I thee to me, O soul),
Caroling free—singing our song of God,
Chanting our chant of pleasant exploration.

With laugh, and many a kiss
(Let others deprecate—let others weep for sin, remorse, humiliation),
O soul, thou pleasest me—I thee.[12]

But let us return to the trans-Pacific story. We shall not consider Leaves of Grass translator Takeo Arishima (1878-1923) as an illustrative representative of Japan's third generation of prodigals, because his American values were transmitted mainly through Uchimura's popular lectures and books. Poet Yone Noguchi (1875-1947), by contrast, spent three years at "the Hights [sic]," the Oakland, California home of Whitman advocate Joaquin Miller (1837-1913). In contrast to the heroes so far mentioned, the flamboyant Miller was more poseur than either muscular or Christian. And instead of the take-charge personalities of a mature Manjiro, Uchimura, or Nitobe, Whitman admirer Charles Warren Stoddard (1843-1909) found Miller's houseguest, Noguchi, possessed a temperament that was "sweet, serious, often sad." He was "sometimes in tears, he knows not why. We are sympathetic to the last degree."[13] For his part, Noguchi wrote in 1897, "So our love – love between Stoddard and me, by Buddha’s name–was sealed one Spring day."[14] In Japan and America, Noguchi explained that "Some people who were craving good-naturedly and even madly for a copious and close comradeship of men tried to introduce even the name of [Whitman biographer and anarchist] Horace Traubel."[15]

A final example demonstrates that Asian prodigals with radical American heroes were not limited to Japan, nor to the Victorian era. In fact, they were not necessarily youthful. Korean theologian Ham Sok Han (1909-1989) attended Tokyo Friends Meeting with Uchimura and Nitobe during the 1920s and for many years was a convert to Mukyokai. In 1953, he broke away from Uchimura and explored Taoism, while never entirely renouncing Christian beliefs. Then, in 1960, at an ashram he helped establish, he submitted to "temptation" and committed a 'sin' whose nature is lost to history, but which he called "totally indefensible." It caused every one of his associates to abandon him. Given that the rumors hinted only vaguely at an adulterous affair with a unidentified woman, and that Ham’s early life betrays some stereotypical indicators of a gay boyhood, it's conceivable that this "Korean Gandhi" was humiliated in 1960 for the kind of offense that in 1953 shattered the career of Quaker African-American civil-rights leader Bayard Rustin—the "American Gandhi."[16]

It was only after I became a sinner [claimed Ham] that I came to realize that the forgiveness of sins is the greatest thing that can happen to a man.

In a poignant letter, he wailed, "The greater wrong a man does the greater is his need for a friend. --- I am dying! I shouldn't die. A friend, I don't have a friend! I need a friend."

After many decades of casual interest in Quakerism, in which he had instead pursued his own way spiritually, he suddenly clutched at this alternative like "a drowning man," even though it might turn out to be only a "piece of straw." Today he is known as the representative of Korean Quakerism as well as the Korean Gandhi. Over the course of a career that included more than twenty books, Ham was imprisoned by the Japanese, the Russians, and Park Chung-Hee for resistance to the oppression of the Korean people. He was twice nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.

The historical import of these prodigal-hero relationships is clear. Visions of East-West brotherhood were more than flimsy sentimentality or high-blown rhetoric—they blazed trails in the Far East for democratic ideals.

Mitch Gould is a multimedia developer, and the creator of VideoPostCard(tm), a Web-enabled Video CD for direct-mail video. He earned a Masters degree in Physics from Georgia Tech and a Masters in Anatomy from Emory Unviersity School of Medicine, and is the author of two books on computer multimedia. He is also the author of the entry on "Love" in The Walt Whitman Encyclopedia. Gould is married and lives in Forest Grove, Oregon with his camerado, Roger Moss. Since arriving in Oregon, Gould has invoked Whitman's poetry in testimony before an Oregon legislative hearing on the "defense of marriage," has published on diversity and tolerance in The Oregonian, and led a campaign by the West Country Coalition for Human Dignity to have his town issue a diversity proclamation.

[1] "Early Japanese Encounters with Americans," Inside/Outside Japan Vol.6 No.4 May 1997. (A Japan External Trade Organization publication.)
[2] Manjiro was the first Japanese citizen to step on American soil.
[3] It's not as if these sailing families had never seen foreigners. Having found that "actual cannibals stand chatting at street corners," Melville's "Ishmael" concluded, "New Bedford is a queer place." Melville, Herman. Moby Dick (1851), Chapter 6.
[4] Richardson, Ralph. Emerson: the Mind on Fire (Berkeley: U Cal Press, 1995). Addison, Elizabeth. "Obedience and Algebra," Emerson Society Quarterly 42: 1996, 153-194.
[5] Blumberg, Rhoda. Shipwrecked: the True Adventures of a Japanese Boy. (New York: HarperCollins, 2001), 77.
[6] Nitobe became the first Under-Secretary-General of the League of Nations and spent some years in Geneva in the years that followed WWI. He was a lifetime member of the Japanese House of Peers. Sung Su Kim. "Sok Hon Ham's Understanding of Taoism and Quakerism." University of Essex, 1994. http://www2.gol.com/users/quakers/taoism_and_quakerism.htm.
[7] Hitsujigaoka Observation Hill in Sapporo is graced by a popular statue of William "Boys Be Ambitious" Clark.
[8] Flewelling, Stan. Shirakawa: Stories from a Pacific NW Japanese American Community. (Auburn, WA: White River Valley Museum/University of Washington Press, 2002).
[9] Kodaira, Takashi, and Alfred H. Marks, "Whitman in Japan." Walt Whitman and the World. Gay Wilson Allen and Ed Folsom, eds. (Iowa City: U Iowa Press, 1995), 429-436. Note that Whitman was also championed by Sadakichi Hartmann (ca. 1867-1944), an art critic who literally embodied the marriage of East and West. In 1884, he tried to organize a Whitman Society in Boston, but Whitman was evidently not convinced that Hartmann had the political and diplomatic skills to manage such a delicate effort in the face of controversy, and he stifled the attempt. In 1889, Hartmann further alienated Whitman's circle with an unauthorized publication of his conversations with Whitman in the New York Herald. Roche, John F. "Hartmann, C. Sadakichi." Walt Whitman: an Encyclopedia (New York: Garland Press, 1998), 269.
[10] Whitman, Walt. Selected Poems 1855-1892. A New Edition. Gary Schmidgall, editor. (New York: St Martin's, 1999), 242.
[11] In 1857, Ascension Islands missionary Luther Gulick wrote to the Boston Journal of Missions: "You may not be fully aware that most of the ships which you are sending to this ocean are the most disgusting of moral pesthouses. Not only are the sailors given to every crime, but the captains with nearly all their officers practice in these seas vices similar to those which brought destruction to Sodom and Gomorrah." What is so surprising is that his complaints were met with outrage not over the offenses but rather over his meddling report. The New Bedford Whalemen's Shipping List for January 5, 1858 described the letter as "an amazing attack on whaler captains which was strenuously denied by the Honolulu Commercial Advertiser and the New Bedford Whalemen's Shipping List." It is however unclear whether Gulick was as much concerned about homosexuality as about his main complaint—the prostitution of native girls. Druett, Joan. More Decency and Order: Women and Whalemen in the Pacific. The Log of Mystic Seaport 39: (Summer 1987), 65-74.
http://www.mysticseaport.org/research/rm-mwespecial.htm
On the other hand, varying degrees of tolerance for same-gender sexuality is often hinted at in Melville's novels and is conclusively documented aboard navy ships of the period. Van Buskirk, Philip C. An American Seafarer in the Age of Sail: The Erotic Diaries of Philip C. Van Buskirk 1851-1870. BR Burg. Editor. (New Haven: Yale UP, 1994).
[12] Whitman, 320-321. Whitman's bardic whaler should be seen a literary descendant of Daniel Defoe’s Quaker William—an amazingly piratical American whose lite-on-the-violence strategies gradually improve business efficiency for his partner, Captain Singleton. William’s love ultimately redeems Singleton’s murderous soul, and the comrades vow to renounce piracy. They settle down as a wealthy but disguised couple in Britain, with William’s sister acting as a beard for Singleton. Defoe, Daniel. The Life, Adventures, and Pyracies, of the Famous Captain Singleton (1738). Turley, Hans. Rum, Sodomy, and the Lash: Piracy, Sexuality, and Masculine Identity. (New York: New York University, 1999). Whitman's unnamed captain is also a first spiritual cousin to Melville's "brown and brawny" Peleg and Bildad. These are "Quakers with a vengeance... modified by things altogether alien and heterogeneous... a thousand bold dashes of character, not unworthy of... a poetical Pagan Roman." Melville, Chapter 14. Let them who decode such Victorianisms judge for themselves.
[13] Austen, Roger. Genteel Pagan: The Double Life of Charles Warren Stoddard. (Amhrest: U MA Press, 1991), 141-142.
[14] Sueyoshi, Amy. Love... by Buddha's Name": The Question of Same-Sex Love in Yone Noguchi. http://apq.anu.edu.au/apq3/Amy_Sueyoshi.html.
[15] Cited in Kodaira, 433.
[16] "Since Ham grew up with four sisters, he was presumably familiar with the 'strength' of femininity and tenderness and may have absorbed this mentality quite naturally. Throughout his childhood Ham was a somewhat shy child, timid and rarely active in physical play with his male contemporaries." Kim, Sung-Soo. An Examination of the Life and Legacy of A Korean Quaker, Ham Sokhon. Chapter Two: The Early Life of Ham Sokhon. http://www2.gol.com/users/quakers/Ham_2_early_life_of_ham_sokhon.htm. Centre for Korean Studies, School of East Asian Studies, University of Sheffield, June 1998. Bayard Rustin's brilliant career in civil rights was permanently crippled in 1953 when he was arrested for having sex with two men in a car.